what poetry are you reading

Fried my brain on the remainder of the excerpts from The Cantos. I found out there was an Italian fascist calendar last night.

rachel zucker. idk

Back to Brecht. Hadn't read his poems in years, but Hofmann's book of German verse reminded me.
Enjoyed this hofmann article on the new biography too. Very tempted to read it.

Trying a bit too hard huh?

I’m not really sure what the case against Brecht is. That he treated women and co-workers badly? That he played fast and loose with the intellectual property of others, but was litigiously possessive of his own? That he wrote no more hit shows after The Threepenny Opera? That he failed to crack America? That he wouldn’t denounce the Soviet Union? That he was drab and a killjoy? That he had it cushy after settling back in East Germany in 1949? That he was consumed with his own importance?

Yes to many of these things. Most of the people that complain about him are disgusting liberal types tho'.

His poetry is effortlessly great (one of the highlights of all the reading I've done this year) - be great to find a copy of the collected poems sometime.

Having trouble getting the sense of these lines (from the "Introduction" to Blake's Songs of Experience)

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past and Future sees
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees,

Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew:
That might controll
The starry pole,
And fallen fallen light renew!

Actually "That might control / The starry pole" is obscure to me, too--can't tell if 'might' is the subject of 'control' (but then wouldn't it be 'Might'?), or if not, what the subject of 'might control' is.

recommend decent Pushkin translations (don't say Vlad the Nab)

xp If it is anything definite in the previous lines, it seems to me that "the voice of the Bard" would be the subject.

Hmmm, you could very well be right--that exclamation point was throwing me, making me imagine "The Holy Word" as the subject of all that follows

I think I'd lean towards 'holy word' as subject of 'might control', though I think there's a little ambiguity there. It's the parallel 'that' construction, plus the Word is more likely than the bard's voice to be able to reorder the poles/restore light.

recommend decent Pushkin translations (don't say Vlad the Nab)

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 14 December 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

According to Robert Chandler the decent ones are by James Falen and Stanley Mitchell (Onegin). Then there is Anthony Wood (The Bridgeroom). Listed in the Russian Short Stories on Penguin. Chandler has translated a few prose works by Pushkin and I'll be reading Queen of Spades shortly.

Hadn't read Miller Williams before these excerpts:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/arts/miller-williams-laconic-arkansas-poet-dies-at-84.html?referrer&_r=2

August Kleinzahler ftw, and to beat the holiday malaise.

Wait that is Lucinda Williams's dad, right?

can someone help me gloss a bit of Milton's Il Penseroso? Feel I'm being a bit dim, but can't untangle it fully. He's talked about courting melancholy outside ('To behold the wandring Moon / Riding near her highest noon') and then has started saying how he courts Her when the weather's crap - first by the fireplace and then

'Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in som high lonely Towr,
Where I may oft out-watch the Bear
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear
The spirit of Plato to unfold
What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook:'

Most of that's fine, but it's the last three lines that I can't get right. Basically it's whether you read it as 1 'The immortal mind that hath forsook her mansion, in this fleshy nook' or 2 'The immortal mind that hath forsook, her mansion in this fleshy nook' (commas for pauses rather than gr sense).

I'm assuming the usual neo-platonic spheres:

Gloss 1: He wishes to know the Worlds/Regions that hold the general mind - these are the regions in the outer spheres, in which the mind has its 'mansion' (as in the astrological term rather than 'big house' obv), which the individual example of the mind has forsaken to be in the physical human.

Consequences: the individual mind partakes (presumably by the chain of being) of the general infinite mind, and in doing so is partly held there. this implies a sort of chipping off the ideal/infinite block to create the human.

OR

Gloss 2: That the mind's mansion is the fleshy nook, and that it forsakes by existing on in those celestial worlds/vast regions (presumably as a consequence of a dual nature - part of flesh, but also infinite.)

Consequences: the mind is part of the flesh, but partakes of the infinite - this is a specific-to-general process. As I say that suggests to me duality rather than a chain of being and makes it the less likely interpretation (especially with Hermes Trismegistus making his appearance there).

I'm crap at this sort of area, but am suspecting 1, with perhaps some tweaks, or 'you've got it completely rong u fule'.

Yeah, I'd lean towards (1). 'Mansion' and 'nook' are such contrastive terms that I doubt he's identifying them with each other.

yep, quite. cheers jmm. it's a really good set of lines in a not enormously appealing poem, and in order to really fulfil the power of those wonderful "vast regions", it's still a bit of a shit team tho. movement forward is superb, but sloppy stuff from Townsend and Rose, who both feel second rate, as well as the inevitable vertonghen. (yes I know he had a good match against Chelsea). feels like poch has worked wonders really.

er what the actual fuck! no idea how I managed to put that there.

meant to say

... it needs to reasoning to be clear

(1) seems closest to me.

I think he is using 'unsphear' in the sense of unleash or let loose with a vague nod to the celestial spheres, although the connection is tenuous. The 'spirit of Plato' that is being unleashed I read here as the Platonic worldview, which Milton admires, but as a Christian can't fully endorse. What he can do is use Plato's sublimity to inspire his thinking toward contemplating the infinite mind of God, which is OK.

The use of 'forsook' implies the entire immortal mind left its mansion to inhabit human flesh. You may recall that Jesus is part of the trinity and therefore he is God/celestial intelligence/immortal mind personified in human flesh.

So, Milton seems to be saying, very ornately: I'd like to spend lots of time in the quiet hours of the night contemplating the vastness of God's intelligence, kind of like my buddy Plato did, and btw God is also Jesus Christ, who was flesh, like you and me, and doesn't that blow your mind.

finding this v tricky and don't have time but I am leaning slightly 2

fwiw i think mansion/nook non-contrastive - 'mansion' has a strong sense of 'dwelling place' at this point, with a particular sense of 'where the soul resides'. (cf Tyndale using it to translate 'skenos', 'tent' in 2 Corinthinans 5.1)

I want to write more but I have to watch The Way We Were right now. I'd really rather think about Milton.

So, Milton seems to be saying, very ornately: I'd like to spend lots of time in the quiet hours of the night contemplating the vastness of God's intelligence, kind of like my buddy Plato did, and btw God is also Jesus Christ, who was flesh, like you and me, and doesn't that blow your mind.

interesting aimless, thanks. In fact I was coming to this from Blake/Swedenborg so the physical nature of Christ was uppermost in my mind here.

hoping woof can tear himself away. "mansion" point interesting, and on that note have you all seen this?

OED in two minutes

I didn't know 'mansion' also had that astrological sense. If there's a double meaning intended there, then it's more straightforward on reading 1, where the mansion of the mind is identified with the celestial spheres. Reading 2 doesn't incorporate the double meaning quite as neatly. Maybe it gives the line a more ironic force.

I'm now leaning strongly 2. I need to check the texts but timaeus and phaedo have souls ascending to the spheres post flesh-life - ie he's calling back plato to get a report on those spheres.

Aimless's argument interesting but Milton's classical and christian heads a complicated fit, even at this age (early 20s I think?).

like I think it's not about the incarnation (despite M's interest in that) - it's a flirting-with-dark-arts thing about summoning dead classical souls (+ classical allusion) that fits with the following lines about daemons (and w/ this vision of the melancholiac).

agree it's the best set of lines in the poem - Yeats's ref to them in Phases of the Moon made me find them - I think that might have been the first time I read (or enjoyed) Milton.

I think he is using 'unsphear' in the sense of unleash or let loose with a vague nod to the celestial spheres, although the connection is tenuous.

fwiw, imo, no way - primary sense surely has to be 'pull out or down from the celestial spheres'.

I should wind down now but I think the tenses point to 2 too - it's fuzzier to have the immortal mind simultaneously be held by the worlds/regions and have forsaken them (whereas it's all good if the soul has forsaken the body and is now held by the world/regions)

_I think he is using 'unsphear' in the sense of unleash or let loose with a vague nod to the celestial spheres, although the connection is tenuous. _

fwiw, imo, no way - primary sense surely has to be 'pull out or down from the celestial spheres'.

yes absolutely. and no don't wind down if you're still feeling on it. found the argument to 2 interesting.

now need to read yeats's ph of the m obv.

primary sense surely has to be 'pull out or down from the celestial spheres'

Then, if Milton intends to unsphear Plato's spirit in order for it (him?) to get to work unfolding Worlds and whatnot, then a literal reading would require Milton to engage in a kind of Faustian calling up of Plato's ghost, which would seem to disqualify a literal reading. If you give it a metaphorical reading, then it reduces quickly to more of a vague invocation. Of course, Plato being pagan, he would not have made into Heaven, and Milton was not a catholic, so it would be something of a puzzle to pin down exactly where Milton thought Plato's spirit was residing.

UNSPH34R

ha yeah it does give me pause to say 'Milton is advocating necromancy'. I do think he wants that sense though, for a Faustian frisson - so dead literally it's something like "I'm going to stay up late reading Plato(*) and go deep into what he says happens to souls after death (ie good souls go to the stars in the spheres) and that is likely what happened to Plato's soul - the bit of him that wrote what I'm reading - after death, so I am 'calling him down from the spheres'"; but I think, yes, he wants a confusion between literal and metaphorical to hit a reader(**) - there's a moment when you think he's talking about actually summoning a ghost.

'Daemons' in the following lines play a similar game maybe - he's clearly using it in an Anc. Greek sense (and I don't see how that would fit with standard christianity - tho' it'd sort of be angels in neo-platonic christianity iirc?), but there's a flash of the unholy there too. I think it’s a sort of posturing by allusion or maybe a way of dramatising the Melancholic man - hints of a destructive darkness in the glamours of hidden knowledge.

Trismegistus is a similarly unsettling name to drop before he goes into this - that syncretic/hermetic/magical tradition isn't at home in mainstream christianity at this point. But I don’t think Milton is exactly a mainstream Christian, even this early (taking 1631/2 as most likely date) - he's already incredibly well-read, frustrated with Charles I's Anglican Church and obsessively interested in the Classical world, or his imagined version of it. Without question he’s a believer, and a devout one, but I think he’s figuring things out and trying things on still, finding different ways to put the classical and christian together - eg his poem on Christ's Nativity (where paganism is gorgeously banished by christ's arrival) or Lycidas (where the tension or confusion has its strongest or strangest effects). In this one (or two, since it's inseparable from L'Allegro), I think he’s basically relaxing - ‘I’m going to play with this classical stuff I love’. Little of it makes any sense in a christian way imo, it's all classical allusion/myth as playground or holodeck.

I don't know if that made sense and I should sleep.

*I think it is the Timaeus maybe? I've dug around and think it's 42b that's directly relevant here, "And he that has lived his appointed time well shall return again to his abode in his native star" - the demons/elements in the next lines would fit too. This would definitely make the body a temporary mansion/stopping-place for the immortal soul. I'd never read the timaeus before. it's nuts.

**Who is this for? If early 1630s, M is still around Cambridge. I would guess someone like Charles Diodati would be the intended audience - trusted friend, comparably smart and learned, probably able to get that Milton isn’t a Necromancer while admiring his game. Basically I think he's showing off to his mates - he is a bit prone to that early on.

great posts, thanks woof. on the angels/dæmons thing, yes, I think they're angels for Milton tho i remember Empson takes Frances Yates to task about her glossing dæmons into angels and demons for the earlier periods she deals with.

coming late to the German 20th century poetry Faber volume, which is, as everyone's been saying, excellent.

coming to 'Of Poor B.B.' straight after Il Penseroso, while questions such as 'what is the nature of our mind?' and 'what is the nature of the place which it inhabits?' (or 'what is the nature of those 'vast plains') meant the first lines of that poem also spoke to me of the places we inhabit even when we are not there:

I, Bertolt Brech, came out of the black forests,
My mother moved me into the cities as I lay
Inside her body. And the coldness of the forests
Will be inside me till my dying day.

The later verses, on the 'houses we held to be indestructible' get enriched and complicated by the reading that by houses he also means our fleshy bodies - I think the line 'We know we're only tennants, provisional ones' allows this interpretation, but doesn't require it. That reading does give a hell of a kick to the preceding line though!

'The house makes glad the eater: he clears it out'

Even leaving that reading to one side, it's a raw elemental poem - 'Of those cities will remain what passed through them, the wind!' - the same wind, presumably, that passes through the black forests from which he came and which sits within him.

That complicated reading where, like those endless gifs, the outer is continually made into the inner is continually made into the outer, giving impermanence and permanence at the same time is encouraged perhaps by the poem A Cloud earlier in the Brecht, where the breaking up of a cloud in a moment where he holds his lover 'like a dream' is expressive of ephemerality in itself, the ephemerality of the experience within which its disintegration took place, but also the only thing he ultimately remembers of that fixed details of that day - a point of permanence. Perhaps also, although the cloud is white, of darkness within innocence being the permanent expression and memorial of that innocence.

ugh, re-reading, that's a hopelessly garbled post, apologies. have been battling eurostar hell, and was writing that very dishevelled, tired and hungover in the waiting room at gare du nord. maybe will unpick it later, but now i'm back home, going for a pint first. stopping only to say that the Empson essay is Elizabethan Spirits, and i just looked it up again and see that it mentions il penseroso for the same reason:

Agrippa is much more hopeful than the Hermetica about these spirits, saying in a splendid passage that they may in their three grades bring inspiration to a technician or an artist or a philosopher, and Dame Frances gives this due prominence {Occult Philosophy, p. 53). But she spells them as 'demons' not as 'daemons'. The OED makes clear that English writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were conscious that a 'daemon' in Plato is quite different from a 'demon' in a sermon, and used the spellings for the distinc- tion; it was given up in the eighteenth century, perhaps out of distaste for pedantry, and perhaps Dame Frances feels the same. So she quotes Milton as confessing, in 'II Penseroso' (lines 93-4), that he has some contact, during his reading at night, with 'those Demons that are found . . . underground'.'daemons', and had mentioned the spirit of Plato just before; he would be indignant at this misspelling, regarding it as typical of the ignorant slander by which he was persecuted.

just trying to link up woof's yeats ref - i ought to read that, but I'm assuming my il p/blake ref is unwittingly a consequence of yeats, as I got to it via Kathleen Raine.

Fizzles, you may have already seen it, but Walter Benjamin's brief commentary on "Of Poor B.B." in "Commentary on Some Poems by Brecht" is worth reading--Benjamin's stress on transience moves his reading close to an anticipation of the late theses "On the Concept of History." I'll stay out of the Milton controversy, but I love woof's posts here.

I'm starting to read Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry in Peter Filkins's translations: the translations so far are stiff on their own terms but at least don't seem seriously misleading, and it's a bilingual edition, so I'm trying to puzzle out some of the originals. At least after reading her first collection, Gestundete Zeit and starting her second, I was a little surprised not to find a degree of formal disjunction similar to that of Celan or her late novel Malina--she does interesting things with the tension between the stately beauty of her verse and its subtle evocation of the horrors of fascism, though. Also listening again, after a few years, to Jack Spicer's Vancouver lectures on poetics (on poetic dictation from outside, the serial poem, and the compositional process: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html ), reading some poems a friend's been working on in response to Spicer's "Imaginary Elegies," and starting kari edwards's last book, Bharat Jiva, about which CA Conrad's written (here.

http://marjorieperloff.com/reviews/songs-in-flight/

This is a highly critical review of the Filkins.

Brecht fun to read in the original, particularly Vom armen B.B.

xyzzzz__, I've read and basically agree with Perloff's review; what I've read of Anderson's translations are typically closer and more compelling than Filkins's work, even if he translated considerably less of Bachmann's work. I'm mostly using Filkins's versions to supplement my rudimentary German while I try to read the originals.

Ah! I was wondering if Empson had anything pertinent to say on spirits/ghosts/d(a)emons - it seemed like one of those questions of early modern belief that sets him on a roll, but I wasn't near books to check. Thank you.

Essay's here for lrb readers btw:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n07/william-empson/elizabethan-spirits

rereading Housman!

has anyone read anthony madrid, either the book or pieces of it

damn, that Empson essay. Really was thinking that it was pretty clear-headed for late Empson – a bit closer to the shore than a lot of his speculative jaunts. Then he gets into interpreting Faustus at the end and:

A play needs a plot, and Marlowe made Faust try to escape Hell by becoming a Middle Spirit; he bought the help of Mephistophelis, who was a Middle Spirit, not a devil, by promising him his immortal soul. Neither of them dare say this because the Devil would overhear, but the Chorus to Act Two, which is mysteriously missing, explained what they are hinting at; a Chorus was needed because the Devil could not overhear it. By the end of Act Two Faust is already certain that he has been cheated, and is damned; he takes to horse-play to stave off his terrors; but after his terrible final speech denouncing Hell he cries ‘Ah, Mephistophelis’, and dies in his friend’s arms with ecstasy, finding that his plan has worked after all.

it makes me want to reread Faustus, even though it is a bizarre reading.

ha ha, i love empson's bizarre readings - allowing interpretations based on propositions withheld as a dramatisation of a fear of being heard by the Devil is a particular good'un.

and thanks one way street - now you mention it i think remembering seeing it, but would have forgotten otherwise. and yes - next step is to get the German originals of my favourites in the volume so far.

he takes to horse-play to stave off his terrors

new board description?

i mean I say 'close to the shore' for that Empson essay, but tbh I was thinking "I am troubled by this in various ways but will let it go FOR NOW" when he was giving his explanation of changelings:

To discover that your baby is a moron is a slow, painful process, and the men cannot feel it decent to interfere with any palliation for the mother such as letting her be told that her real child is being much appreciated among the fairies. The trouble is that it has lost its chance of Heaven, but it will live unusually long. This comfort was often enough. It made baby-watching a very responsible business, and probably increased the unhealthy shutting of windows, because the fairies flew in there, but to speak against it would be callous. If the baby had been stolen by devils, that would be horrible, and there could be no connivance in the belief.

not poetry per se but i picked up berryman's out of print novel 'recovery,' his thinly-veiled unfinished autobio about AA-in-the-clinic. its a very unflattering but thoughtfully drawn self portrait imo, shouldn't be OOP even if it is unfinished.

i got looks reading it at the bar.

just picked up 'our andromeda' too, looking forward to it.

i got looks reading it at the bar.

how ugly were they

ha it was all the regulars so they thought it was pretty funny actually, got a story out of the bartender about how "we don't use styrofoam cups at the water cooler here anymore because people kept saying it reminded them of the meeting they were skipping"